I'm afraid my current understanding of the usage of the gerund is
still rather limited to what Warder or Duroiselle says about it, which
isn't very much. I've hardly studied it in the Saddaniti so I can't
help much there, but I did do a quick check and found that there is
quite a bit of material on the gerund to go over, in fact, enough to
keep me engaged for a long time just to digest it all. The usage of
tvaa, tvaana, tuuna is covered in 7 suttas (§1150-6). The gerund isn't
necessarily confined to a time earlier (pubbakaale) than that of the
main verb but can also be used to indicate the same time
(samaanakaale) eg. andhakaara.m nihantvaana udito'ya.m divaakaro --
this day-maker (ie, the sun) arose dispelling the darkness; and a
later time (apare kaale) eg. dvaara.m aavaritvaa pavisati -- shutting
the door, he enters.
I haven't been paying much attention to the examples of the use
of the gerund that you have been discussing from da Silva's primer.
Honestly, I couldn't make much sense of these sentences and wondered
if they might not be just bad Pali. The use of the gerund with the
infinitive is something that I haven't noticed before. As we are
studying Pali primarily to be able to read the old texts, I think the
student should be studying sentences taken directly from the Tipitaka
as soon as possible (the approach taken by Warder, Gair, etc.) It
shouldn't be hard to find simple and easy-to-understand sentences in
the Tipitaka and the stories in the commentaries.
I think one of the big items missing for the English-speaking student
of Pali is an exhaustive and authoritative reference grammar written
in English. The best I've come across so far is Duroiselle's grammar
but it's rather old and has it's limitations. K.R. Norman mentions in
his foreword to Geiger's A Pali Grammar how the PTS had been unable to
persuade anyone to write such a grammar. So the situation remains
that, in order to advance one's knowledge of Pali beyond the
introductory books on Pali, one will have to start looking at the old
native grammars written in Pali such as those of Kaccayana and
Aggavamsa.
Best wishes,
Jim
<< Dear Nina, John and friends,
thanks. I would say that my level of Pali is still low, and there's
much to learn. The use of "and" is what I picked up from Pali Primer.
In Duroiselle's, Chpt.14 §618(i), The Gerund always denotes an action
completed before another; it may be translated by the word "having"
followed by a past participle as: gantvaa, having gone; or by the
past tense followed by the conjunction "and" : gantvaa, he went
and... The gerund, therefore, being very extensively used, is the
most common connective in Pali , and practically does away with the
Pali conjunction equivalent to the English "and" connecting two
sentences.
I noticed in Ven. Narada's text, he introduced past tense before
gerund, and that fits Duroiselle's description of gerund. The same
goes for Warder's. Pali Primer introduces gerund before past tense,
and we know that it's okay, as gerund can be used with present tense
as well.
Although I'd like to subscribe to what John says: "that the gerund
generally is a subordinate clause to the verb that follows it most
closely", we may be wrong. The reason is that we probably think that
Pali, with its ancient grammatical rules, is as flexible as English.
And if so, Nina is right that gerund has a more rigid usage than we
would like to think. Unfortunately, I do not have any other grammars
with me. Probably Piya, Jim or Dimitry can throw in some light on
this.